Toronto
member Chris Atack is the author of the novel Project Maldon,
published by Baen in July 1997.

Alan
Barclay spoke on story structure and plotting ("What Happens
Next?") to the North Shore Writers Association
in affiliation with Bravo Vancouver
on Oct 28, 1997 at the Capilano (a.k.a. Edgemont) Library in North Vancouver. It was the
first time he got paid for speaking!

Now available, the new story
collection The Reality Machine by Cliff Burns is being published
by Black Dog Press as a limited
edition volume. To order ($18.95 plus $3.00 for shipping), one may write to Black Dog
Press, 1142 150th Street, North Battleford, SK, S9A 1S6; each copy is signed by the
author.

A short story by Joël Champetier, "Anciennes
cicatrices" ("Old Scars"), first published in imagine... 59,
was reprinted in Panorama de la littérature québécoise contemporaine as an
"example" of a Québec SF short story. This work released by Guérin in 1997 weighs in at 822 pages. In
other news, the Canada Council awarded Joël a B
grant for the writing of a fantasy novel.

New Toronto member Laurie Channer
is the author of the stories "Abe Ever After" published in the Fall 1995 issue
of On Spec, "Family
Melodies," published in the Winter 1997 issue of On Spec, and "Best Before," to
be published in the anthology Dark Corners, due out from Key Porter Books in May 1998

Our first Guelph member, David Chato,
has published or sold the following stories recently: "The PlayTime Case" in the
winter 97 issue ofOn Spec(nominated for the 1998 Aurora), "Music Monkey" in the spring 98 issue
ofOn
Spec, "Blind Date" in the
upcoming fall issue of On Spec, as well as others to Parsec, Horizons SF, SpaceWaysWeekly and Distant Suns.

Eric Choi's short story
"Divisions," which first appeared in Tesseracts6, edited by Carolyn
Clink and Robert J. Sawyer, will be reprinted in the
upcoming Northern Suns anthology (Tor)
edited by David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant. Northern
Suns will be a follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Northern Stars
anthology of Canadian SF, which was also edited by Hartwell and Grant. In April, Eric was
named the Québec finalist in the Telesat National Satellite Contest to name Canada's
first direct-broadcast satellite. His suggestion of "Inukshuk" (Inuit for
"beacon") made him one of six regional finalists chosen from over 36,000
entries. The contest was judged by a panel of famous Canadians including Bryan Adams,
Marnie McBean, Dan Aykroyd, and Peter Kent. The winning name of "Nimiq"
("uniting force") was submitted by Sheila Rogers of Nepean, Ontario.

"The Darkbringer," a fantasy
story by Mary Choo,
appears in the Winter 1997 issue of The Black Lily. Mary's Gothic horror story
"Roses from Granny" in Northern Frights 4 received special mention in a
recent Locus review, which noted that,
"It offers a most peculiar blending of possession and gardening."

Michael Coney's two
British Columbian comic novels, No Place for a Sealion and A Tomcat called
Sabrina, have been sold for publication in Russia. His story "The Most Ancient
Battle" from Phantoms of the Night received Honourable Mention in the tenth
annual collection of The Year's Best
Fantasy & Horror edited by Datlow
and Windling. His Greataway story "What
Are Little Girls Made Of" appeared in TransVersions
8/9.

New Toronto member Peter
Darbyshire is the author of the short stories "The Roadkill Man" and
"The Fourth Horseman," published respectively in the Spring 1995 and Summer 1998
issues of On Spec.

Cory Doctorow has sold
the following stories: "Craphound" to SF Age; "Fall From
Grace" to Asimov's; and "Jaime
Spanglish in the Nile" to On Spec.
His non-fiction piece "Dumpster Diving" appeared in the September issue of Wired and "Mackerel" will appear
in an issue later this year. He has also sold several reviews for Wired's Fetish department which will
appear over the next 12 months. Cory's "The Street Finds Its Own Ass With Both
Hands" will appear in The
New York Review of SF, while his column in SF Age keeps going strong.
Likewise, he has become a de facto staff writer for the Sovereign Media (SF Age's
publisher) entertainment titlesSci-Fi Entertainment, Sci-Fi Universe.
Mostly he covers movies: Hercules, Mortal Kombat Annihiliation, Flubber, Alien
Resurrection, American Werewolf in Paris, and other classics of our time.

Candas Jane Dorsey
was a co-winner of the 1998 James Tiptree Jr. Award, which honors works of science fiction
or fantasy that expand or explore gender roles. This year's awards, which include a $1,000
cash prize as well as quite a bit of chocolate, will be presented at Readercon 10, to be
held July 10-12 in Westborough, Mass. She was honored for her book Black Wine,
which was published in 1997 by Tor Books and which also
received the 1997 William J. Crawford Memorial Award for best first fantasy novel.

Dave Duncan ("We are
Sarah B. Franklin, Ken Hood, and Dave Duncan, not always simultaneously.") reports a
couple of books just out: Daughter of Troy, an historical novel by "Sarah.
B. Franklin." Daughter of Troy is an Avon
trade paperback, May 1998. ISBN 0-380-79353-9. It is a retelling of the Trojan War,
reconciling Homer's Iliad with Bronze Age archeology. Demon Knight, a fantasy by
"Ken Hood," published by HarperPrism as
a paperback original in June 1998. ISBN 0-06-105759-6. Demon Knight is the third
volume in The Years of Longdirk series.

Catherine Donahue
Girczyc's story "Raven Rattle" appeared in the Winter 1997/1998
issue of Parsec, graced
with a good illustration by artist John
Platt. When we last heard from her, she was writing a script for an animated series
called Cybersix, featuring a female superhero, to be co-produced by Japan,
Canada, and the U.S.

Calgary member Robyn Herrington
has published or sold the following stories: "Zoe Forever" in issue 6 of Talebones, "Evolutionary
Game" in the DAW anthology Return of the
Dinosaur, "Under the Ocean there are no Stars" in the current issue of Parsec, and "Dark
Song" to Tesseracts6. Her
story "All That Matters" will appear in the Fall 1998 issue of On Spec.

A short story of Nalo Hopkinson's was supposed
to be read on a special edition of CBC Radio's Between
the Covers early this year. CBC has commissioned
stories from a bunch of writers, and they will be read by professional actors. Nalo says
"supposed to be" because she's still writing the story!

Winners of the Prairie Fire1998 Science Fiction Writing
Contest were just recently announced. Congratulations to Jan Lars Jensen
("The Strip Mall Selects for Evolution"), First Prize of $350; Douglas
Smith ("Symphony"), Second Prize of $250; Darren Latta
("Marking Time on the Far Side of Forever"), Third Prize of $150; and Michael
Brockington ("Suicide for Beginners"), Honorable Mention. The
winning stories will appear in Prairie Fire. Contest judge was Robert Sawyer,
author of Frameshift, Starplex, The Terminal Experiment (and more), and the new
president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America.

Our new member Krista V. Johansen
is the author of the YA novel Torrie and the Dragon, released by Roussan Publishers in 1997, and the story
"The Wastelands: a Beginning," published in the Fall 1997 issue of On Spec.

Sandra Kasturi's poem
"Lunar Inconsistencies" appeared in the latest issue of Prairie Fire. She continues work on her
abysmally bad novel while finally getting back to work on editing the anthology of
speculative poetry, The Stars As Seen From This Particular Angle of Night.

Eileen Kernaghan's
poems "Sin-Eater" (from TransVersions)
and "Chiaroscuro" (from Tesseracts5) received
Honourable Mention in the tenth annual collection of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
edited by Datlow and Windling. Eileen's updated fairy tale "The
Watley Man and the Green-Eyed Girl" was the lead story in TransVersions 7. Her poems
"Zero Visibility" and "Seven Things I Know About Green" will appear in Tesseracts7, while her fantasy story "The Road to Shambhala" is
included in a forthcoming Tundra Books anthology, What
If...? Amazing Stories selected by Monica Hughes. Reprint rights to her young adult
SF story "Tourists" have sold to Troll
Communications in New Jersey.

Roberval member Hugues Morin is the
coordinating editor of Solaris. Last year, he edited the first book of critical
essays in French on Stephen King, Stephen King: trente ans de terreur (Stephen King:
Thirty Years of Terror), published by Alire. In
the course of promoting the book, he was invited to the Radio-Canada
radio show Indicatif Présent on October 28th, the Radio-Canada television show Québec Magazine
on October 30th, and to the Radio-Canada television
morning show Bonjour chez vous on October 31st. The book has been covered in the Journal de Montréal and La Presse.

Ursula Pflug has been
very busy and very very popular with editors! She reports: My story "Basement
Alembic" is in the current double 8\9 issue ofTransVersions. "Yellow
Flowers" has been sold to Chris Reed's BBR # 24, forthcoming who knows when;
"Stones" has been sold to Susan MacGregor's Divine Realms,
to appear this fall; "Blue Gloves," has been sold to an upcoming issue of The Antigonish Review.
"Bugtown," which appeared in TransVersions
6, has been bought by the David G. Hartwell\Glenn GrantTOR anthology, tentatively titled Northern Suns.
"Bring Me Fire, Ape," has been sold to Terra Incognita, and will be
appearing in a forthcoming issue. She also says: "I spent the winter working on a
historical (depression) Canadian play, co-authored with Ian MacLachlan. Entitled Hallelujah,
I'm A Bum! after a period song of the same name, it's part of a rural historical
festival. I tried to sneak in speculative elements where possible, although didn't get the
flat out time travel play I originally wanted. It's currently in rehearsal for a late
July\early August run."

Québec City's Alire publishing house has released two new novels by Esther Rochon. The
first, Le Rêveur dans la citadelle (The Dreamer in the Citadel), is an expanded
version of a shorter work which originally appeared in L'Épuisement du Soleil (The
Exhaustion of the Sun). The second is Secrets, the latest volume in the Chroniques
infernales series.

As of late April, Mark Shainblum's comic strip
Angloman--co-created with illustrator Gabriel Morrissette--will be moving from the weekly Montreal
Mirror to the Sunday edition of the daily Montreal
Gazette. The move will substantially increase not only the physical size of the
strip but also its readership, estimated to be in the neighborhood of 300,000.

Toronto-based writer Douglas Smith
recently sold to Amazing Stories in the US and to Tenebres in France. His other short
story credits include Interzone
in the UK, the annual Canadian anthology Tesseracts6,
and the Canadian literary journal Prairie Fire.

His Tesseracts6
story, "Spirit Dance" is a finalist for the 1998 Aurora Awards. His Prairie Fire story placed second in the
magazine's 1998 SF short story competition, judged by Canadian SF author, Robert J. Sawyer. His Interzone story is on the short list for inclusion in
the second annual "Best of the Rest" anthology, featuring top SF short stories
published outside of the US.

Montreal member William
Southey is the author of the short stories "Gone to Earth and Ashes,"
published in the Winter 1994 issue of On Spec,
and "The Hills," published in the Winter 1997 issue of On Spec.

Two new young adult books by Jean-Louis Trudelare
coming out this spring: Les Bannis de Bételgeuse (The Exiles of Betelgeuse) and 13,5
km sous Montréal (13.5 km Under Montréal). He has also sold a young adult story to
the McClelland and Stewart anthology, What
If... Amazing Stories selected by Monica Hughes, while his novella "Scorpion
dans le cercle du temps" is part of the massive anthology Escales sur l'horizon,
newly released by the Fleuve Noir in France. He
also won the "Share a Byline with Phyllis Gotlieb" writing contest put on by TransVersions.

Edward Willett got
married, to Margaret Anne Hodges, an engineer for SaskTel, on September 27, in Regina. He
reports that he is enjoying being married very much! Ed's YA fantasy Soulworm, published by
Royal Fireworks Press, was short-listed for a 1997 Saskatchewan
Book Award in the category of First Book. His second YA fantasy, The Dark Unicorn, is
due out this spring, also from Royal Fireworks. Ed also recently sold a humorous short
story, "Strange Harvest," (which grew out of his years of taking pictures of
odd-looking vegetables when he worked at the Weyburn Review) to On Spec.

Allan Weiss
reports these sales and publications: fiction: "The Last of the Maccabees" in Arrowdreams,
"Exchange" in On Spec and
"The Solomon Cheats" in Tesseracts7;
nonfiction: "Separations and Unities: Approaches to Quebec Separatism in English- and
French-Canadian Fantastic Literature" in Science-Fiction Studies (March
1998) and "Judith Merril: A Retrospective" in Odyssey 2 (1997).

Susan MacGregor is
pleased to announce that Divine Realms, an anthology of SF combined with
spiritual themes (previously called The Testament Anthology) has been accepted by Turnstone Press in Winnipeg. Expected release of
the anthology will be this fall when Turnstone
includes Divine Realms in introducing their new imprint, Ravenstone. Divine
Realms originally came about two years ago when Susan's story "Drying Out in
Purgatory" made her wonder if other writers were working along the same lines. The
result of that line of inquiry is a collection of 17 short stories written by the
following fellow-writers:

Susan's "The Vivaldi Connection"
also appeared in On Spec's Spring theme Music issue, and her story "Oyster Love" will be appearing in the
upcoming Northern Frights V anthology. With regards to spiritual SF as compared
to horror, they appear to be at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but in "Oyster
Love" they meet.